Strangers are we on earth one and all

Kill yourselves with vapors and with blades,

Hurl horrors, lofty national wishes,

Toss to earth the life you have been handed!

Unto you the lover is not granted.

Every land is turned unto the waves,

Beneath your foot the place evanishes.

There may be cities come to be on high,

Nineveh, a spitting in God’s face of stone!

Oh, it is a curse in our wayfaring...

Fleeting must before us fall the firm thing,

What we keep, we can no more keep by,

And what we have is weeping when all’s done.

Mountains are, and flatlands still are patient...

Astounding, how we down and out decline.

All is river, whither we abide.

Who to being saith mine, is soon belied.

Guilty are we, and to ourselves indebted,

Out lot is: debt, to settle up in fine!

Mothers live, to disappear from us.

And the house is, that from us it fall.

Blessèd looks, that from us they flee.

The heart’s beat itself is not in fee!

Strangers are we on earth one and all,

And it dies, with which to each we bind us.

Franz Werfel